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Back To Surfboard Shaping Basics

Over the past 4 years I have been experimenting with all kinds of different concaves and rockers for my high performance boards. I’ve gone from super deep to slight concaves, and boards that have a ton of rocker to boards that have more relaxed rockers. I’m always searching for a perfect match between these two elements of surfboard design. I believe these two things make a board work amazing or absolutely horrible. I was stuck in a period where all I was doing was deep concaves and it seemed that was where everybody was headed and most of our customers where asking for it. I was making myself these designs and kept feeling the boards to be very inconsistent.

Testing my shapes’ turning radius. Photo: Rob Keith

On a new design I was working on for 2011, I went back to the basics. I did a completely flat bottom feeding into a deep vee through the fins and a relaxed rocker throughout. I also made it a standard shortboard outline with a wider tail block. My first surf on the board was great as I finally eliminated a lot of the negative feelings of some of my past designs. The board held speed well, transitioned through turns smoothly, and everything felt like it was in sync. I was so hyped after first surf I told Will I want to offer this as the new high performance model for 2011. Going back to basic concepts led to the Quantum being born.